Black and white New York. Frances, running. Twenty-seven is an awkward age—not young enough to be reckless, not old enough to have it figured out. Frances is clumsy, broke, and supposedly “undateable.” Yet, I adore her clumsiness, for it looks frighteningly like my own.
I first watched Frances Ha when I was twenty-six, just a year younger than Frances herself, and I felt like Noah Baumbach had reached into my life and pulled out all my anxieties, all my failures, all my desperate attempts to appear like I had my life together when I very clearly did not. Frances is a dancer who cannot quite make it as a dancer, living in New York on the edge of financial collapse, watching as her friends move forward with their lives while she remains stuck in a perpetual state of almost-but-not-quite.
This isn’t just a coming-of-age story; it is a love letter to the best friend who used to dream with you but is now drifting away. That specific loneliness—“the person I love is my best friend, and she is leaving me behind”—cuts deeper than any romantic breakup. Frances and Sophie are not just friends; they are soulmates, two people who have built their identities around their relationship with each other. They finish each other’s sentences, they share private jokes, they plan a future together. But then Sophie starts dating someone serious, and suddenly the future they imagined is no longer possible.
What I love about Frances Ha is the way it captures the specific pain of watching someone you love outgrow you. Sophie is not cruel or unkind; she is simply moving forward with her life, making practical decisions, becoming an adult. And Frances is left behind, still clinging to dreams that may never materialize, still refusing to compromise or settle. The film does not judge Frances for this. Instead, it suggests that there is something valuable in her refusal to give up on her dreams, even when everyone around her is telling her to be more realistic.
We dance in the streets, pretending to be the main characters of the world, until reality folds our names to fit into a tiny mailbox slot. Frances Ha. An incomplete name for an incomplete life. This moment, when Frances realizes that her name does not fit on the mailbox and she has to abbreviate it, is both funny and heartbreaking. It is a perfect metaphor for the way that life forces us to compress ourselves, to make ourselves smaller, to fit into spaces that were not designed for us.
The film’s most famous scene—Frances running through the streets of New York to the sound of David Bowie’s “Modern Love”—is pure joy. It is a moment of transcendence, a moment when Frances is not thinking about her failures or her anxieties but simply existing in her body, moving through space, alive. I have watched this scene dozens of times, and it never fails to make me smile. It captures something essential about what it means to be young and broke and uncertain but still capable of moments of pure, uncomplicated happiness.
What makes Frances Ha so special is its refusal to provide a conventional happy ending. Frances does not suddenly become successful or find romantic love or reconcile completely with Sophie. Instead, she finds a small apartment, a job that is not quite what she dreamed of but is meaningful nonetheless, and a way to make her name fit on the mailbox. She learns to be okay with an incomplete life, to find meaning in the small victories rather than waiting for some grand transformation.
Even if everything is a mess, we must find our own rhythm within the stumbling choreography of adulthood. This is the lesson of Frances Ha, and it is one I return to often. Life is messy. We do not always get what we want. We do not always become the people we thought we would become. But we can still dance. We can still run through the streets. We can still find moments of joy and connection and meaning, even in the midst of failure and disappointment.
